The
OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government
agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus
process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards
support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless
and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower
technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible
and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit
the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

The SWG will consider change requests
for the charter that have been posted through 16 August 2013
via an email message sent to charter-requests [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (subject: EOPMOS%20Charter) .

The
OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government
agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus
process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards
support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless
and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology
developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful
with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC
website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

An IP Program and Testbed 10 Q&A Webinar will be held on
6 August 2013. More information will be available at the RFQ/CFP URL above. You
are also invited to follow us on twitter, Linkedin or Facebook to stay
updated on the Q&A Webinar, clarifications to requirements, kickoff
details, etc.

The OGC Testbed 10 Kickoff event for the CCI and Open
Mobility threads (see below) will be held 7-9 October 2013 in Washington, DC.
The Aviation thread kickoff will be held 27 September in Frascati, Italy during
the week of the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Frascati.

The Point of Contact is Nadine Alameh: techdesk [at] opengeospatial [dot] org.

- Cross-Community
Interoperability (CCI): Increase Geospatial community interoperability by building
on CCI OWS-9 work in semantic mediation, volunteer geographic information
(VGI), provenance and data quality, and Global Gazetteer. Explore the potential
of interoperability in the hydrology domain and utilizing ontologies to more
easily share and visualize geospatial data.

- Open Mobility:
Explore the geospatial standards requirements needed to support the growing
emerging mobile environment where client applications are mobile, information
services are mobile, and increasingly distributed across cloud infrastructures.
The Open Mobility thread will address these requirements while leveraging on
the work achieved in the OWS-9 Testbed in the areas of Geopackages and
Geopackaging services and new OWS Context encodings.

- Aviation: Develop
and demonstrate the use of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM)
and the Flight Information Exchange Model (FIXM), building on the work
accomplished in prior testbeds to advance the applications of OGC Web Services
standards in next generation air traffic management systems to support European
and US aviation modernization programs.

The RFQ/CFP includes
details of these threads as well as details on participation eligibility, selection
process and kickoff workshop information.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments
are part of the OGC
Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative agile prototyping
program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate
standards into the OGC Standards
Program, where they are formalized for public release.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 480
companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities
participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial
standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that
"geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and
mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

The OGC Web Services Context Document (OWS Context) standard was created
to allow a set of configured information resources (service set) to be passed
between applications primarily as a collection of services. OWS Context is designed
to support limited in-line content as well. The goal is to support use cases
such as the distribution of search results and the exchange of a set of
resources such as OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Service (WMS), Web Map
Tile Service (WMTS), Web Coverage Service (WCS) and others in a ‘common
operating picture’ supporting situational awareness. Additionally OWS Context
can deliver a set of configured processing services (Web Processing Service
(WPS)) parameters to allow the processing to be reproduced on different nodes.

This initial call for comment is for two (2) OWS Context documents: A
Conceptual Model and the ATOM encoding for the conceptual model. The Conceptual
model document describes the use cases, requirements, conceptual data model of
the OWS Context encoding standard. The goal of the model is to provide a
core model, which is extended and encoded as defined in extensions to this
standard. A Context reference is a fully configured service set to be defined and
consistently interpreted by clients. The ATOM encoding is the first extension
of the core (conceptual model).

Please register your comments on this candidate standard at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/102. The OGC OWS
Context Standards Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a
final draft of the candidate standard. The comment period ends 8 August 2013.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies,
government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in
a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC
Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web,
wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower
technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible
and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit
the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

27 June 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced a call for public comment on the OGC WaterML 2.0 – part 2: Ratings, Gaugings and Sections Discussion Paper. This OGC discussion paper can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/dp.This document describes an information model for exchanging rating tables, or rating curves, that are used for the conversion of related hydrological phenomenon (e.g. a stage-discharge relationship). The specification also describes a model for the observations that are used to develop such relationships, often referred to as gaugings, or gauging observations.The information model is proposed as a second part of the OGC WaterML 2.0 suite of standards, building on OGC WaterML 2.0: Part 1, which addresses the exchange of time series data.The following organizations submitted this document to the Open Geospatial Consortium:

CSIRO

Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK

KISTERS

San Diego Supercomputer Centre, University of California

USGS

Aquatic Informatics

The joint WMO/OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group will consider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard. This draft will be used for testing within an upcoming Interoperability Experiment. Interested parties are encouraged to get in contact with the working group.The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

The Best of Sensors Application Awards recognize advances in sensor and sensor-related technologies, either in the form of novel technologies or as significant improvements in existing technologies.

Melanie Martella said, "I am thrilled to to recognize the OGC for its Sensor Web Enablement Initiative. The consortium's members who have worked on this project over the years are creating a robust platform that makes it easier for people to make efficient and effective use of the wealth of Web-connected sensor data available. This is an important project with broad scope and I congratulate them on their achievement."

Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC, said, "This is a wonderful honor that recognizes the vision and hard work of a very large number of OGC member representatives. Mike Botts, chair of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Domain Working Group, deserves special mention for bringing SensorML into OGC 13 years ago and creating the momentum in OGC to advance our sensor standards framework. He still leads the working group effort, but scores of others have also worked to make these standards an extraordinary and very important part of easing the integration of sensors into the broader IT infrastructure. This award honors their service, and they can all be very proud of what they've done."

The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) (http://www.ogcnetwork.net/swe) standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) comprise the only truly open international standards suite that provides a comprehensive platform for publishing, discovering, assessing, accessing and using sensors and sensor systems of all kinds. The standards documents are freely available on the web, as are open source software implementations of the standards. Their use requires no proprietary platform support of any kind, and yet they can be implemented on platforms other than the open Internet and Web. The encodings and interfaces are based on fundamental, widely used and open Internet and Web standards and best programming practices. The consensus process in which SWE standards are created and maintained is open to all who want to participate.

SWE standards have been implemented in hundreds of applications by private sector, government and university developers. A few examples include:

· US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Integrated Oceans Observing System (IOOS)

· CitySense sensor network City of Cambridge, MA: A real-time data integration and analysis system for air quality assessment.

· EO2Heaven project (http://www.eo2heaven.org/): A spatial information infrastructure, which applies SWE, services to monitor human exposure to environmental pollution and for an early detection of infections.

· Europe Emergency Response: (http://www.ess-project.eu/ an infrastructure based on SOS, SPS, and SES to provide real-time information to crisis managers during abnormal events to improve the management between forces on the ground (e.g., police and firefighters) and the control centers.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

30
May 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public input on the
draft charter of a proposed Standards Working Group (SWG) that will develop a
candidate POI (Point of Interest) encoding standard for possible adoption by
the OGC membership as an OGC Standard.

The
draft charter is available at
https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/54043.
Comments are due by 30 June 2013. Submit comments by sending an email to charter-requests [at] opengeospatial [dot] org (subject: POI%20Charter) (charter-requests at opengeospatial.org).

The
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Ordnance Survey are the
convenors of the new SWG.

A
point of interest (POI) is a
specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. A POI is
typically specified by a latitude and longitude and a name, but may include
other information about the named location. A simple POI encoding standard will
make POI databases more useful by making them more easily usable by more
applications as well as facilitating sharing of PoI data between organizations
and applications.

Considering how ubiquitous the need
for POI information is, it is surprising that international standardization
efforts have been few. In many ways, one could consider POIs a most fundamental
requirement of any spatial data infrastructure. PoIs are also important in the
commercial sector in personal navigation and social networks. For example,
social networks from Google, Facebook and others have made location such an
integral part of their data model that almost every activity a user engages in
can be tagged with location, weaving places of interest seamlessly into the fabric
of their social platform.

This standards effort grows out of
semantic interoperability experiments to merge place name databases from
different organizations in the OGC Testbeds OWS-8 and OWS-9, and also work that
was done by the W3C POIWG, and OGC’s OpenPOI database project. The OGC's OpenPOI
database, now in beta, contains POIs for
millions of businesses and civic places across the globe. It provides a
reference implementation for an early version of the proposed Point of Interest
(POI) encoding standard.

About the OGC:

The OGC is an international
consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research
organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop
publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable
solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based
services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to
make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any
application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

29 May 2013 - The
OGC CityGML SWG, the SIG 3D, and Technische Universität München will host a
joint international workshop to gather requirements to guide the development of
the next major version of CityGML (3.0). The workshop will take place on the 20th
and 21st of June, 2013 in Munich, Germany. The organizations seek input
from CityGML users, data producers, software manufacturers, and scientists
working with or on CityGML. Participation in the event is free of charge
including coffee breaks and light lunch meals. Travel, accommodation, and the
social evening event are at the expense of the participants.

Date
& Time:

Workshop: 10:00-17:00 (CEST) 20 June and 09:00-15:00
21 June, 2013.

Evening Event: 18:00-22:00 20 June, 2013.

Short OGC CityGML 3.0 Standards
Working Group meeting: 15:00-17:00
Friday 21 June

SIG 3D members developed the first version of CityGML (http://www.citygml.org) and in 2005 submitted CityGML as a
candidate standard into the OGC standards process. CityGML is a comprehensive open
data model framework and XML-based encoding standard for the modeling, storage,
and exchange of virtual 3D city and landscape models. Since 2008 it is an OGC
standard. CityGML is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography
Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml), an international standard for
spatial data exchange and encoding approved by the OGC and ISO. CityGML 2.0 has
been adopted as part of the European Union's common spatial data infrastructure,
INSPIRE, and it is being implemented across Europe, Canada, the Middle East and
Asia.

About SIG 3D

SIG 3D (http://www.sig3d.org/) is a special interest group of the German
National Spatial Data Infrastructure (GDI-DE). The members of SIG 3D come from
all over Germany and the bordering European countries. New members from
anywhere in Europe are welcome.

About Technische
Universität München, Chair of Geoinformatics

The Chair of
Geoinformatics at TUM is a main driver in the development of methods and models
for 3D geoinformation. It has great experience and tradition in OGC
standardization. Thomas H. Kolbe is head of the chair of Geoinformatics and
full professor. He has also been director of the Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation
Science and Chair of Methods of Geoinformation at Berlin University of
Technology. Kolbe is the initiator and one of the principal architects of
CityGML. More information is given at http://www.gis.bv.tum.de/

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies,
research organizations and universities participating in a consensus process to
develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support
interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, mainstream IT, and
wireless and location-based services. OGC standards empower technology
developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful
with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC
website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

The
OGC WaterML 2.0 Encoding Standard, recently approved by the OGC
membership, has been endorsed as an official component of the civil
Earth observation strategy of the federal government of the United
States. The National Strategy for Civil Earth Observations identifies 12
"Societal Benefit Areas" for collection of information, one of which is
water. The report states, "WaterML: Water Markup Language(ML)
is an informatics initiative of the CENRS Subcommittee on Water
Availability and Quality that provides a systematic way to access water
information from point observation sites." CENRS is the NSTC’s Committee
on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability.

Through
USGEO, the United States is a founding member and vital contributor to
the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO). GEO, a group of
88 nations and the European Commission, is developing the Global Earth
Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). GEOSS is a set of agreements and
technical arrangements being developed to link together existing and
planned observing systems around the world. The OGC, a Participating
Organization in GEO, leads the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP).

About the OGC:

The
OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies,
government agencies, research organizations, and universities
participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available
geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that
"geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and
mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make
geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any
application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website
athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

2 May 2013 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) and the
OpenMI Association (OA) have announced a call for public comment on the Open
Modelling Interface Version 2 (OpenMI) and its accompanying reference manual.
This standard defines a means by which independently developed computer models
of environmental processes, or indeed any processes, can exchange data as they
run and hence facilitates the modelling of interacting processes.

The original driver for the standard was the European Water
Framework Directive and its requirement for an integrated approach to water
management. It was foreseen that implementing the Directive would be very
challenging and that there would be a need to provide help, in the form of
decision support systems (DSS), to environmental managers. As Earth systems are
complex and interrelated, these DSS would need to bring together many models in
order to better understand and predict the environmental impacts of events and
policies. To make it feasible to link together models of different processes
from different suppliers and hence simulate process interaction, the European
Commission therefore co-funded the research and development of a generic model
interface, the outcome of which is the OpenMI.

Roger Moore, chairman of the OpenMI Association, said, “The
OpenMI Association sees huge opportunities ahead for many stakeholder groups if
the linking of models of different processes as they run can be made simple and
reliable. Our immediate goal is to facilitate the integrated modelling needed
to understand Earth system processes and hence help scientists, policy makers and
managers find sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. By publishing the
OpenMI as an adopted OGC standard, we seek to make the OpenMI standard
available and accessible to the worldwide modelling community.”

Environmental modelling is not the only application of
integrated modelling. For example, a possible shorter term application will
simply be in enabling developers to convert their existing large, and often
unmanageable, applications into sets of linkable components. This could change
the modelling market from one for complete systems into one for components and
services. It could make it much easier for products to be brought to market,
widen participation and dramatically drive up the rate of innovation.

“Progress toward a sustainable future depends on our
improved understanding of Earth systems and our collective ability to act from
the local to global levels," said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the
OGC. This partnership with OpenMI enables our organizations to work more
closely to assure that open standards-based modelling capabilities can be seamlessly and
rapidly integrated into processing environments."

The OpenMI Association is an entirely open not-for-profit
international group of organizations and people dedicated to taking the OpenMI
(Open Modelling Interface) forward into the future. Its primary objectives are
to develop, maintain and promote the OpenMI and integrated modelling. Learn
more about the OpenMI Association at http://www.openmi.org.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies,
government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in
a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC
Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web,
wireless and location-based services, sensors and mainstream IT. OGC Standards
empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services
accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially
enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.